Take a Message to Congress

Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. President, was known to be afflicted with a stammer and so feared public speaking that he became the first of 24 consecutive U.S. Presidents to deliver the annual presidential message to Congress - now known as the State of the Union address - as a printed text to the Capitol for a clerk to read.  Given Joe Biden's own stammer - and given his lifelong ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time - he could have easily revived the tradition that Jefferson began.  In fact, many Democrats might have been more than happy with such a decision.

Democrats needn't have worried.  President Biden delivered a strong speech that was as powerful as Mario Cuomo's famous keynote address at the 1984 Democratic convention and roared out of the gate with strenuous defenses of the American democratic system and aid for Ukraine as well as a condemnation of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.  He doubled down on his record, citing the increases in infrastructure spending and the decrease in the unemployment rate and reminding Americans that COVID had gripped the country at the time of his inauguration and how all of these advances came once his administration got control of and helped end the pandemic.

Even better, he pushed for the immigration bill that Republicans had supported before Donald Trump told them not to, citing the bill's highlights and what it would accomplish with Senator James Lankford - the Oklahoma Republican who spearheaded the bill nodding and vocalizing his agreement.  President Biden even showed up Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), having an appreciative  laugh at her MAGA hat and red blazer as he entered the House chamber and later taking up her dare to mention the name of Laken Riley - the Georgia nursing student murdered by an illegal immigrant - in his support for the Republican immigration bill.  (A similar bill giving states more power to challenge federal immigration laws when wanting to deport illegal immigrants, named for Laken Riley, passed the House hours before.)  His mere energy got Republicans so angry when he proposed increased aid to education, improving literacy, working on reducing inflation further - the sort of issues no one could oppose - and they subsequently booed them.  Most importantly, he played up the assault on women's reproductive rights and addressed members of the Supreme Court in the second person - to their faces - in admonitory language and vowed that women were ready to reverse the Dobbs decision at the ballot box.  (Justice Alito, who actually wrote the Dobbs decision was nowhere to be found, as usual.)  

President Biden even address the age issue, noting that with age comes wisdom, and he reminded people that Trump - whom he referred to thirteen times as "my predecessor" - was almost as old as he was but his ideas - oligarchy, patriarchy, authoritarianism - were older.  But for all of his abilities to ad-lib and banter with Republicans like they were his sparring partners in a boxing ring, he did have a couple of missteps, coughing on occasion and stumbling over his words in talking about women's political power and saying that they had already helped Democrats in 2022 and "in 2020" when he meant to say "in 2022 and 2023."  Also, one speech does not a turnaround make, and a Make America Great Again PAC ad showing a compilation of Biden's verbal and physical slip-ups is now getting a good deal of attention.  (It also juxtaposes these scenes with a clip of Kamala Harris laughing, the better to remind MAGA voters that a Biden death in office would give us a female President who is half black and half South Asian and prefers Bootsy Collins to Phil Collins . . . and her husband's a Jew!) 

With Nikki Haley - who frequently raised the specter of "President Harris" to Republican presidential primary voters - now out of the presidential campaign (as is Dean Phillips on the Democratic side), President Biden needs to win of swing voters - some of whom supported Haley in the GOP primaries - and neutralize the inevitable MAGA mobilization.  He needs to keep up what he did this past Thursday.  Thankfully, he appears to be doing that; he's been on the campaign trail this weekend, as Biden-Trump Mark Two - the first general presidential election rematch since 1956 - begins in earnest.

I forgot about the Republican response to Biden's address from Katie Britt.  I sort of prefer to.